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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if it's normal, but I can flex the muscles inside my ears. When I do it I can hear the muscles trembling loudly which overpowers other sounds. It helps reduce the noise level and pain if there is a loud noise, especially when I cannot put my fingers in my ears.

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Careful with this, you might be doing more than just flexing your tensor tympani muscle, you might also control the pressure inside your ear.

I can do both of these. The latter is rather dangerous in the long term, although in the short term it does reduce the perceived volume quite a bit. For some reason when I was a kid I preferred a negative pressure in my ears which deformed my eardrum. I still do and I concisely need to remind myself to reset the pressure back to normal.

Do you have any more info on this? I have unilateral deafness and am constantly increasing the pressure of my good ear throughout the day by popping it. (The way I do this is sort by blowing a quick burst of air out my nose and clicking my ear at the same time.) I have long worried it may not be healthy but I have been doing it for years and have no recorded hearing loss from it, I continue to do it because the added volume it gives me is sometimes the difference between having to ask "what?" a third time in a row.

The vasalva manuever results in the same effect. We have manual control of a muscle that lets us sync the pressure in our inner ears. I haven't met anyone in person, but there are others at r/earrumblersassemble

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